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The population of South Dakota is 776,000. (2205) South Dakota Quick Facts From The U.S. Census Bureau The typical Congressional district has a population of 690,000. (2006) United States House of Representatives

Representation in the House has always been based on population.

That is why money bills must originate in the House. (Think of it as The Commons) Each state gets a minimum of one Congressman. Representation in the Senate is by state, two senators per state, elected at large. There has never been such a thing as a senatorial "district."

That is how the game has been played for over two hundred years.

And no, I'm sorry, I can't recall what legislation or governmental change it was which resulted in the marginalization of the House and the electoral college, but there was one (iirc it was at about the time of the civil war/war between the states/war of northern agression

The Electoral College became problematical as early as 1800 with the tie vote that tossed the choice between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson to The House of Representatives. (where it took 36 gut-wrenching roll calls to reach a decision) and with the "Corrupt Bargain" of 1824 that ended with John Quincy Adams in the White House and Henry Clay as Secretary of State.

This is the reaction every time I say this. Lets look at the numbers, as your statistics support my original statement, even if you don't want to face it.

First lets figure that there are about the same number of working men to working women ( https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/prin t/us.html )

Next, lets assume that near 100% of the single income, married couples are man working woman at home. While there are the random stay at home dad, I have yet to meet one, or meet anyone who has met one, so lets assume they are statistically insignificant. Per the census ( http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cp s2005/tabA1-all.csv ) half of all women over 15 are married. That combined with the 40% single income family number shows that 20% of the pool of women have chosen a form of income that is not available to men, and are thus not available for IT. shift the numbers to working aged women, and it is closer to 25%. The fact that some of these women are caring for children has absolutely no baring on whether they should be counted in the pool of available IT workers. They part of the workforce.

So, right off the top, we should see 4 men for every three women. Then we have to figure out the number of women that are not primary bread winners. These are the ones who have a job because they don't want to sit at home, or have a job for extra spending money. Those kinds of things. I think the numbers would be higher, but lets put that at a similar number as those that don't work at all. That takes out another 20% of the women available for IT, as IT is not a part time, casual job. So, now we are looking at 1 woman for every 2 men at best. Now these numbers go across the board for 'career' type jobs. Since everyone is trying to even out the gender numbers, we can expect to loose another 20% of the women who are competent enough for the job to be competent enough for other, better paying, easier jobs. So, we are now at somewhere around 3 men for every woman that is even considering IT.

Also per the census, 32% of all men over 15 have not been married, while only 25% of all women have never been married. That tells something very important. Women are more likely to be interacting socially with the opposite gender. E.G. Dating. Given that more women are dating than men. When someone is dating, they are not sitting in their mothers basement hacking away on their computers. This gives men a noticeable edge in qualifications for IT, and makes classes easier for those that get into IT via schooling. If we wash out another 10% or so of the women due to the fact that they had the potential, but found dating to be more interesting, we have 4 or 5 men for every woman.

We now have to look at what percentage of women simply will not work in an environment that is 4 or 5 men for every woman, often leaving them as the only woman at the company or in the department. Particularly when a good many of the men are the very same ones how got into IT because other women did not see them as fit for dating. This may mean that they are socially awkward, aggressive, passive, ugly, or any combination. And probably more reasons that I haven't thought of. Either way, many of these men are the very men, women don't want to spend time around. I would say you are going to lose another 50% of your women from this alone. We now have almost 10 men for every woman that would be willing to work in IT.

So, to say that other 'opportunities' are a joke is being naive at best, a sexist at worst. I didn't even go into the fact that from a very young age, little girls are very aware that these other 'opportunities' to support themselves exist, and little boys know that it is very unlikely that they are going to get the opportunity to live off of a sugar mama. This knowledge starts people on their paths long before start actively looking for a job.

Now, I don't want to sound like the macho guy. I'm not, far from even... Combine 1 and 2. You do realise that most family these days are working couples. Two incomes, not the one income of the 50s and 60s. So according to the US Census bureau the median income is about $43K/year. (for 2004). More than often this household is composed by two incomes, so -perhaps- just -perhaps- that 50s guy that came home to his housewife who held his martini cool for him has a better income relatively.

As said, I don't want to come over as a macho... I just see this myself: my dad could pay for our whole family, and I struggle with both me and my wife employed. (Okay, struggle is an exaggeration, but if I want to build a house someday, it will be "struggle")

1) US median household income was less $35K/year (2005 dollars) and considerably less than the $46K/year in 2005.

2) Women had near zero job opportunities

Now, I don't want to sound like the macho guy. I'm not, far from even... Combine 1 and 2. You do realise that most family these days are working couples. Two incomes, not the one income of the 50s and 60s. So according to the US Census bureau the median income is about $43K/year. (for 2004). More than often this household is composed by two incomes, so -perhaps- just -perhaps- that 50s guy that came home to his housewife who held his martini cool for him has a better income relatively.

As said, I don't want to come over as a macho... I just see this myself: my dad could pay for our whole family, and I struggle with both me and my wife employed. (Okay, struggle is an exaggeration, but if I want to build a house someday, it will be "struggle")

Because they're smart enough to see that although people aren't unemployed in droves yet, the quality of the jobs they have is steadily falling, and the pay they're getting is steadily falling (inflation-adjusted). What's happening, long-term, is a greater and greater separation between the rich and the poor, and the middle class is drying up and disappearing.

A greater separation between the rich and poor (or even rich and middle class) does not mean the poor and middle class are any worse off. You claim that the middle class pay is steadily falling (inflation-adjusted), but that simply isnt true.

From 1973-1998 the inflation adjusted pay for the middle class rose by 11.0%. The pay for the poor raised by 3.9%. That means the poor and middle class have more spare money now than they did 30 years ago. Sure the richest 5% of Americans had their wealth go up 81.7%, but that just means they have more money. It does not mean that the middle class has less money.

After the recession early this decade there was a drop in median household income. But it is going up again (up 1.1% from 2004-2005 after adjusted for inflation). There were great gains in the 90s, and whenever pay goes up that fast it is of course going to level out. But that isnt because of outsourcing, it is just because the boom in our economy in the 90s gave rise to household income too quickly. Its basically the same thing as the current housing bubble that has just started to bust.

The simple fact is that Real Median Household Income has risen by 31% in the last 40 years (adjusted for inflation). The average american family has a bigger house, more food (maybe a bad thing with obesity being a problem), more cars, etc.

If there is any problem with outsourcing, it is the fact that we are using outsourcing to improve our economy while exploiting the third world.

--

Americans are uneducated, political, and no matter how long they work, they can never become wealthy or own houses.

US home ownership rates are about at record highs (69%). Compare with 63% in 1965.

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/hvs/histori c/histt14.html

Moreover, home ownership rates of those 65 and over is 80%.

http://www.danter.com/STATISTICS/homeown.htm

27.2% of Americans have graduated by college, an all-time high:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainmen t_in_the_United_States

Market researcher David Cole, who runs the firm DFC Intelligence, says his best estimate is that 40 percent of U.S. households own a working video-game console.

link

Census Info

The facts are that there are approximately 100 Million households in the us, of which 40% own a working console ...

Now the PS2 has sold about 42 Million systems, the Gamecube has sold about 12 Million systems and the XBox sold about 16 Million systems in North America of which the bulk was in the United states. As a rough guestimate, I would expect 1/3 to 1/2 of all household which have consoles to have multiple systems; being that this represents a userbase approximately equal to the Gamecube or the XBox I would assume that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would try to ensure that their platform was the dominant choice for these gamers.

As a point of reference, in Michigan, this tax comes to ~$0.62/gallon, or approximately 30% of the price of the fuel. Every time that I fill up the tank on my 1997 Dodge Ram, I am paying ~$17 towards the building , maintenance, and repair of roads.

If we stick with the state of Michigan, in the USA, we have approximately 6.4 MILLION people between the ages of 18 and 65. Assuming that these people are all licensed drivers, and that they drive an average of only 16 miles/day, 5 days/week, in vehicles which get an average of 20 mpg, then we are talking about more than $817 MILLION dollars/year for Michigan, alone, from fuel taxes. That's an extremely conservative estimate, and it does not even begin to consider e.g. commercial traffic, joy-rides, &c. (16 miles/day? I drove ~556 miles this past weekend.)
Sticking with Michigan, the Department of Transportation has a budget of ~$3.1 Billion dollars. That's not exactly a huge leap from the extremely conservative estimate above.
In short, your $10/gal figure is absurd.

Is this actually true? I would like to ask Mr. Lutz for a cite or three to back this assertion.

It seems reasonable at first blush, after all, unless you just LOVE sitting in your car idling down the freeway for hours a day, you probably want to live somewhere close to work. The average distance from home to work in Los Angeles is 8.2 miles (pdf), which includes claims that this is "consistent" with census data (except that it looks like the Census doesn't report distance, they report travel time) and compares with other metropolitan areas. This (another pdf) says that the average first job for people going off welfare is 6.5 miles away. This PDF claims that work causes people to drive an average of 12 miles per day. This site says that over 1/3 of workers in the 100 largest cities drive more than 10 miles to work.

Company Vice Chairman Robert Lutz said in a statement that more than half of Americans live less than 20 miles from their workplace.

Is this actually true? I would like to ask Mr. Lutz for a cite or three to back this assertion.

Is this really that hard to believe? It seems reasonable that more than "half" of Americans live less than 20 miles from work.

The US Census Journey to Work: 2000 notes that "average travel time to work was about 26 minutes in 2000." This means that unless people are driving faster than an average of 46 miles an hour for their entire work commutes, which I find unlikely, Americans are, on average not going farther than 20 miles. Granted, this still would be an average, but other data in this publication, while all focused on times and not distances, would appear to support the claim that a good chunk of Americans are fairly close to work. Also, given the average radii of suburban areas around city centers, and the massive growth of office parks around the outside of cities, it's not at all surprising to me that "over half" of Americans live within 20 miles of work. Out of curiosity, why did this strike you as so surprising or unbelievable?

New Zealand is a country of 4 million people. It gets a lot of attention on Slashdot because people speak English there. There are 121 countries that have more people than New Zealand.

Fair point about Kent State (I wasn't aware that there were that many Nat'l Guard there, much less how many fired their weapons).

So, assuming (and this is a *huge* assumption, I admit, but I'm working with the statistics given) the entire U.S. military were tasked with invading U.S. cities and locking them down, say, under an act of martial law, and given "shoot on sight" orders for anybody who leaves their home during "unacceptable hours" (say, 7AM-7PM) -- given that the military has around 1m members, that's 333,333 soldiers willing to fire on Americans.

333k soldiers -- almost the population of Wyoming (around 509k) -- vs. the nation, with probably the majority of the rest willing to engage in less-violent (but still-repressive) complementary actions, such as locking people in detention camps, some forms of torture, and so on. With each group distributed evenly across all states, that comes out to the following state-by-state distribution:

.Alabama 5,126 killing 10,251 non-killing
.Alaska 746 killing 1,493 non-killing
.Arizona 6,679 killing 13,358 non-killing
.Arkansas 3,125 killing 6,251 non-killing
.California 40,633 killing 81,266 non-killing
.Colorado 5,246 killing 10,493 non-killing
.Connecticut 3,948 killing 7,895 non-killing
.Delaware 949 killing 1,897 non-killing
.District of Columbia killing 619 1,238 non-killing
.Florida 20,006 killing 40,012 non-killing
.Georgia 10,203 killing 20,405 non-killing
.Hawaii 1,434 killing 2,868 non-killing
.Idaho 1,607 killing 3,214 non-killing
.Illinois 14,353 killing 28,707 non-killing
.Indiana 7,053 killing 14,107 non-killing
.Iowa 3,336 killing 6,672 non-killing
.Kansas 3,087 killing 6,173 non-killing
.Kentucky 4,693 killing 9,387 non-killing
.Louisiana 5,087 killing 10,174 non-killing
.Maine 1,486 killing 2,972 non-killing
.Maryland 6,298 killing 12,596 non-killing
.Massachusetts 7,196 killing 14,392 non-killing
.Michigan 11,382 killing 22,763 non-killing
.Minnesota 5,772 killing 11,544 non-killing
.Mississippi 3,285 killing 6,570 non-killing
.Missouri 6,523 killing 13,046 non-killing
.Montana 1,052 killing 2,104 non-killing
.Nebraska 1,978 killing 3,956 non-killing
.Nevada 2,716 killing 5,431 non-killing
.New Hampshire 1,473 killing 2,946 non-killing
.New Jersey 9,804 killing 19,608 non-killing
.New Mexico 2,169 killing 4,337 non-killing
.New York 21,653 killing 43,306 non-killing
.North Carolina 9,765 killing 19,530 non-killing
.North Dakota 716 killing 1,432 non-killing
.Ohio 12,892 killing 25,784 non-killing
.Oklahoma 3,990 killing 7,980 non-killing
.Oregon 4,095 killing 8,189 non-killing
.Pennsylvania 13,978 killing 27,956 non-killing
.Rhode Island 1,210 killing 2,420 non-killing
.South Carolina 4,785 killing 9,570 non-killing
.South Dakota 873 killing 1,745 non-killing
.Tennessee 6,706 killin

It is clear from the previously cited chart that the Top 5% have benefited from a redistribution of income since 1980. I don't think this redistribution of more income to the top 5% is a function of their increased education, for their working harder, based on merit, because the other groups are less educated or for any other reason other than an economic structure has been changed to benefit those at the top

Agreed. An interesting question is what caused the economic structures to change? Regulation/deregulation? Given the amount of regulation that we have (and often need), it's probable IMO that regulatory changes played at least a partial role. There has also been a shift towards "knowledge work" in our economy, which leads to greater disparities in productivity (and hence income), and also tends to require little financial capital to start businesses (which tend to produce lots of income when successful). I don't know how we untangle those effects to see how much of the effect was from what. I guess if I did I'd be an economist :-)

There are actually some interesting statistics about what the top 5% means - currently it's people making $157,000+ a year (sources: current and from 2001). Well-off for sure, though not as high as I'd assumed. The Wikipedia article actually breaks it out by percentages in each $10,000 increment of income (though the last two bars in the graph are actually $50k increments, which is why there's an odd spike there).

I don't think the problem is primarily education. I think the primary problem is concentrated wealth. If you start out in life with a $1 million dollar trust fund, you are going to have different opportunities than someone that has to earn money to put food on their parent's table - irrespective of your education level.

It is certainly true that someone with a $1 million trust fund has enormously more opportunities than the rest of us. The children of those in the top 5% of earnings also have better opportunities. But few people are in that situation. I'm much more interested in what's happening to the other 95% of people. It's not like there's a fixed amount of income to go around, such that the top 5% getting more necessarily means the other 95% get less. If the economy grows, we can all earn more; and if we got to a point where everyone had enough to live good lives, but a few people still made way more money, I think I'd be okay with that. Problem is that we're not at that point. So I see the problem as how do we as a society help folks in the 95% with the problems that impact them.

Maybe it's just a philosophical point, but I think it can make a difference in what types of solutions come to mind, and their likelihood of being implemented. We see the 95% problems all the time - the skyrocketing cost of healthcare and loss of insurance, the job insecurity caused by the shifts in our economy to more education-intensive jobs (and the loss of some less-education-intensive jobs folks have relied on for years), risks in retirement and Social Security, etc. I think people are willing to fund through their taxes solutions to these problems, because they're serious problems and people see the need for some level of a safety net. But I believe you'd have a much harder time convincing people there should be new or higher taxes on people in the top 5% simply by virtue of the fact that they've gotten to the top 5% and the income levels are uneven - it's seen as punishing success.

Affirmative action should be showing a preference for candidates that are members of traditionally discriminated against groups when all else is equal.

I think pretty much everyone would agree the idea of helping individuals who have been disadvantaged by circumstances beyond their control (whether it be by racism, poverty, etc.). But that's not qu

It does not seem fair. Those who sacrifice, save and work hard should be rewarded. Those who do not, should not.

Are you saying that we live in a meritocracy? So, the trend since 1980 that you can see in this chart (Table 680) showing that the top 5% of people had an increase in their percentage of all earnings move from 14.6% to 20.5% must be because the top 5% must have started working harder since then, right? George Bush is president because he was the guy most deserving to be president in the country?

Social justice is simply the idea that there are structures in place in our society that benefit some at the expense of others - irrespective of individual effort. Even if you believe that market economies are the most efficient (which is a dubious assertion because market economies fail to account for externalities like pollution in their price), you have to acknowledge that the U.S. does not have a market economy. Subsidies and government controls in all their myriad varieties exist because certain things (agricultural production, industrial capacity, etc.) need to be maintained to mitigate the unfortunate highs and lows (which are highly inefficient) that are built into free markets.

So, the question is that if you are going to have controls, then you need to make sure that the distribution of the benefits are equitable and designed to reward behaviors you approve of like sacrifice, saving and hard work. The simple fact is the current system is not set-up that way, and it is clear from looking at the progression of income distribution (unless you want to make a classest argument that somehow the distribution of hard working people is more highly clustered in the upper regions of income).

I would like some explanation, any explanation, about how socialized medicine magically results in waiting lists.

Meh, I will give it a shot.

15% of people dont have health insurance. My bet is that and equal number have crappy insurance People without health insurance (or good health insurance) don't see a doctor as frequently and will suffer under illness rather than shell out money to have it treated. Me for example - I have tendinitis in my heel today, I have unbelievably good health insurance, but, I will suffer through today and tomorrow. When medical care is free those people will go to the doctor more often clogging office visits up - a 30% increase in business will do that(from the above numbers). The average ER is exactly this sort of thing, People wait until their health issue becomes a crisis than they go to see the doc, waiting times in your average ER are horrendous if you are doing anything other than dying of a bleed out or heart attack. Now, when you add in the fact that once it is free, you also end up with everyone who has a sniffle thinks they need to see a doc and whammo - waiting lists to get the most trivial of procedures done.

Don't get me wrong, I advocate some form of universal care, but the reality is that the infrastructure can't take it. I work at a college that turns out nurses and we cant turn them out fast enough for the community - and we are at capacity, the list to get into the program is astounding. So the ability to maintain capacity is at capacity as well, let alone having the ability increase it (and we would if we could find nursing instructors). Medical schools are in the same boat as we are. Add in the looming elder years of the boomers and we will strain just to keep them taken care of, let alone increase the capacity of the medical field to handle a 30% rise in the number of patients.

Sera

I think you are kinda missing the point of what he is saying. At our growth rate, it will become essential for us to go either into space to new worlds. According to http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/world.html It took us roughly forty years to double from 3 billion to 6 billion. Assume we create more medicines, etc over time. Assume also that birth control is used by more people and the overal growth rate for the world say drops to..... I don't know... a doubling time of 50 years. Slightly slower.

Now say the Earth is at half maximum capacity in the future. If those people have children the way their parents did, then in fifty years the population will double and the Earth will be full. In another fifty years, they will need a second Earth to house all the people. In another fifty years, four Earths. I think that's what he is really trying to get across.

That is to say eventually we will either face famine, war, etc as the Earth simply becomes too populated and is drained of its resources, or we must escape to the cosmos. And honestly, this is probably the most far out reason of why we should go to other planets. There are a lot cooler reasons like simple exploration and things like that.

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html sez:

U.S. population 300,280,905
World population 6,559,255,288
(@ 19:34 GMT (EST+5) Nov 25, 2006)

And Google sez: (300280905 / 6559255288) * 100 = 4.57797253%

So yeah, Why are we even considering catering for 4.6% of the worlds population?

Given that poverty is on the decline your understanding of the word "increasingly" is at odds with how I generally use it.

The reason for that is not because the degree is worth less but because there is less opportunities to go around. Our whole economy has been sold off to the god of "global free trade." Of course there is nothing free about it, it's just a catchy name.

Uh huh. Try looking at some silly things called facts

Real median income has been on an almost uninterrupted ride up since 1967. Meaning, if you took every person in America and lined them up from poorest to richest, and then followed the guy in the exact middle for 40 years, and adjusted his salary for inflation, he'd be better off to the tune of $10,000 a year.

This is despite the fact that the "middle" keeps changing. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States - do you think they're pushing median income DOWN (they're making LESS than the average Joe) or UP (they're making MORE than the average Joe)? Not to say that immigration is good/bad/indifferent/whatever - point is that the middle is consistently better off, despite pressures that keep pushing the middle back down.

The actual number of "opportunities" went up by 92,000 in October, and there are 6,800,000 more jobs today than there were in 2003.

Doesn't exactly seem like there's "less opportunies to go around."

As for "free trade", the "free" part is "free as in speech." It refers to trade being "free" from restrictions like tariffs and subsidies - it's not "catchy", it's perfectly accurate.

Trade can be "free" in the other sense, too. Simply put, some countries just make things better - the U.S. can produce a ton of grain for a lot less cost than Japan can. Japan can make a ton of semiconductors cheaper than the U.S. can. By trading grain for semiconductors, the U.S. gets semiconductors at the price of its cheaper grain, and Japan gets grain that would have cost more than the semiconductors it traded for them.

Although a simple example, it's how trade works - you trade what you can make cheapest (relative to other things you make in your country) for things that cost more to make in your country.

Two hundred years ago, when that thing called the "Industrial Revolution" took off that made possible the existence of the computer you're whining from, it was called "division of labor" or "specialization." This is the same concept, but on a global scale.

But, then again, "Dey turk mah jugh!"

There's just so much wrong with this that I don't know where to start.

Does this line of reasoning extend to college?

To some degree, yes. But finishing college is much harder than finishing high school. I'm sorry if this offends you, but the vast majority of people who don't finish high school are just plain stupid. There are exceptions; a small minority of students have some sort of mental problem that keeps them from understanding the material (and mental problem != stupid), some of them leave for concern about their own safety, some leave because their family is in poverty and they have to work for food, and so on. But like I said, these are weird exceptions. Most people who don't finish high school don't because they're stupid.

Is there any direct correlation between success in high school and, as you say, "long-term economic health"?

Yes, as a matter of fact, this is a well-established fact. Here are some statistics to back that up. On average, college graduates make more than twice as much as people who don't finish high school.

I also personally know college drop-outs who make more money than I could ever dream of earning.

So? I do to, what's your point? That basing your opinions on weird exceptions instead of the rule is a good thing? That just because Michael Jordan has more money than he knows what to do with, I should tell my kids to forget all that stupid studying, they should be playing basketball instead? That doesn't sound very smart to me at all.

Do the government and corporations (arguably the most powerful entities) operate mostly with short-term goals or long-term goals?

Businesses that operate mostly with short-term goals in mind tend to blow up in pretty spectacular fashion. Witness Enron and the dot-com demise. So do most people. Witness day-traders and steroid abusers. As for the government, that's why a lot of things are so screwed up these days. Witness global warming and our dependence on oil. This is an attitude to be discouraged, both in our personal lives and in the bigger picture, not encouraged. If you don't feel that way, then I feel sorry for you, and I especially feel sorry for any kids you might pass your warped view of reality on to.

But hey, good luck, and who knows? Maybe you'll be the next Bill Gates. (But if you didn't finish high school, I really doubt it.)

Media spin my ass. Are you asking for someone to report that, to quote Lewis Black, "We took our school[s] from the truly shitty shitty shitty, to stinky farty smelly?"

Considering there are about 16+ million high school students ( http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p20-533.pdf ), it should not be surprising to hear that an estimated 1 or 2 students don't make the cut out of a 30 student class. That was certainly the case when I was in high school over a decade a ago. Moreover, is anyone really -that- surprised that our larger school districts, which were the focus of that article, pull in the largest dropout rates?

Moreover, that ABC article is not even accounting for grade inflation, problems with standardized testing, and lowered standards. We're arguably giving diplomas to more and more people who probably wouldn't have received them 20 or 30 years ago.

You got an Insightful, but you've made some mistakes there.

You've taken 1.25% of 300M people in the US. But there aren't 300M voters. Rounding up since the 2000 census, there are about 200M US citizens 18 or older ( http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t31/t ab01-01.pdf ). About half of those eligible actually vote. Midterm elections run lower, at about 30%, and presidential elections run higher, more like 50-60%. It would be more correct to say that a 1.25% error rate works out to about a million votes, not 4 million.

So basically what you are saying is that middle class people who vote Republican are stupid and that middle class people who vote Democrat are smart. It is particularly interesting that you respond to a post describing over-generalizations by making an even larger one.

If you equate education with intelligence, and I'm not implying the two things are the same, you will find that populations with better education tend to vote Democrat. Go figure.

The way to break it down is to look at states in terms of per-capita graduate degrees and per capita undergraduate degrees. If I remember correctly, of the top 15 states in per-capita graduate degrees category, only 2 voted Republican in the last presidential election. The trend was very similar for undergraduate degrees as well. This trend has held of for a few decades, though it varies a bit here and there. I'm not positive, but I think the 2 states that Bush got that were in the top 15 on education were Colorado and Virginia. Interestingly, the bottom 15 states all voted Republican.

I collected the education data from the 2000 Census Datasets for a paper I wrote after the last election. I admit, I did steal the idea. Someone passed around something like it on the internet after the election. I don't recall if it was accurate or not, but it was what gave me the idea for the paper in the first place.

The US soldier fatality percentage is the same for the current Iraq War as for the entire WW2.

WW2 (5 years)
American soldiers
16,113,000 serving
292,000 battle deaths
1.8% dead

Operation Iraqi Freedom (3 1/2 years and counting)
American soldiers
133,000 deployed
2,461 hostile deaths
1.8% dead

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/a rchives/facts_for_features_special_editions/001747 .html
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_or bat.htm
http://icasualties.org/oif/

i'm sure that happens a lot. i'm also sure that when we can only get 64% of the eligible voters to go and vote when it's only once every 2 years (setting aside primaries) and a ballot that takes up a couple sheets of paper, we'd see a vanishingly small number who would go to vote daily/weekly on 500 page budgets and laws.

Remember, it's not 50% of American Citizens, it is but 1/2 of the percentage that leaves their television shows and actually VOTES: In 2004, a major Presidential Election, only 64% of Americans voted. Now, let's try comparing apples to apples here, and take it back to 2002, the last midterm election: 46% of Americans voted. I think that's more along the lines of what we will see tomorrow.

So, yeah... anyone who doesn't give a shit, doesn't vote, but they sure can BITCH! Just remember... if you don't go and press a button/pull a lever/sign your name -> YOU CAN'T BITCH!!!!!!!!

I, for one, am not voting for a single solitary soul (not that they have any) that currently is in office. It just pisses me off that because of my precinct, it will all be straight Republicans. Oh, and I'm voting NO on every single ballot issue.

Remember, it's not 50% of American Citizens, it is but 1/2 of the percentage that leaves their television shows and actually VOTES: In 2004, a major Presidential Election, only 64% of Americans voted. Now, let's try comparing apples to apples here, and take it back to 2002, the last midterm election: 46% of Americans voted. I think that's more along the lines of what we will see tomorrow.

So, yeah... anyone who doesn't give a shit, doesn't vote, but they sure can BITCH! Just remember... if you don't go and press a button/pull a lever/sign your name -> YOU CAN'T BITCH!!!!!!!!

I, for one, am not voting for a single solitary soul (not that they have any) that currently is in office. It just pisses me off that because of my precinct, it will all be straight Republicans. Oh, and I'm voting NO on every single ballot issue.

According to
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

Median household income, 2003
$43,318

(Note that is household income not an individual).

So congratulations on your wealth, but don't be smug and dismissive.

It might also be worth mentioning that in an average hour, 6304 people die. That's more than twice the number of people who died in the September 11th attacks (2973). I'm not saying those attacks weren't a big deal, but maybe we are overestimating their effect a bit?

That is totally false! How could you even write something like that?

The value of a college degree:

An average of $20K extra a year for the rest of your working lifetime. (And this ignores the fact that the college premium is steadily increasing!) If you use a 20% discount rate (this reflect that a bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush, and more particularly is the discount rate used for startup businesses - the thing most comparable), the present value of the extra income is $20K/0.20=$100K.

The cost of a college degree:

$50K, obviously a smaller number than $100K. It doesn't matter how much you could make investing it, because you could easily invest the additional income as well. If you want to be totally pedantic, you can account for the years spent in college (you don't make more money until after you graduate) - pretend you can make 20% return on investment per year. OK, so now that $50K becomes: $12.5K + $12.5K*1.2 + $12.5K*1.2*1.2 + $12.5K*1.2*1.2*1.2 = $67.1K. Still, obviously a better plan.

And this all assumes a 20% return! If you assume a 10% return, you get a value of $200K at a cost of less then $60K!

For real data on the value of a college degree, please see the US census information.

Another source of this inequality is immigration. Here's a surprise: when poor Mexicans (and other immigrants from various countries) come into the country, that makes for a greater degree of wealth inequality in the nation. Yet little has changed save for the location of these immigrants. Perhaps this says something about global inequalities of some sort...

Either way, go find a copy of Money Income in the United States by the Census bureau and look it through it and other data on inequality. I find the upward trend a little unimpressive, and certainly doesn't scream anything incriminating at Bush.

But we're drifting waaaay offtopic. ("I'll probably get modded down for this!")

most politicians compromise here and there

Is that like how Gwen Moore is a Senator who supports the Constitutionally violating census form? The form that features at $1000 per question fine if you opt not to answer?

So much for the swearing to uphold The Constitution.

Actually, you wrote that there was a federal program that provided health care to all Americans. You then specified that the program you were on was AHCCCS. The conclusion that you were implying that AHCCCS was available to all American students comes directly from your sloppy writing. And despite your insistence that Medicaid provides health care to everyone, there's still 46 million Americans without health insurance. Even in Arizona, apparently, 18.7% of the population doesn't have health insurance. Oh, and here's a demographic breakdown of the people without insurance.

Furthermore, you don't seem to know the difference between "anecdotes" and "evidence". Your friends, money-driven nice-people that they may be, are going to be pretty self-selectingly biased. You would only meet nurses and/or doctors who decided to emigrate. Beyond that, you're just plain wrong. Every study I've ever seen on the issue has agreed with one fact: The U.S. pays a higher percentage (16%) of it's GDP for health care than any other country in the world. FYI the number is 9.7% in Canada. Thus, your UK doctor friend is simply wrong.

As for why they don't mention AHCCCS, I would hazard a guess that they don't mention the existence of those plans for the same reason they don't enumerate the private plans that exist, the annual budget of NASA, or the percentage of people who drive cars. It's not actually relevent.

I heard on the radio this morning the states are the worlds third most populous country, right after China and India. Surprised me.

You shouldn't be surprised, this has been true for pretty much all of the last 100 years, the link only goes back 50 years but the assertion is true. As with the current mania for wondering what one billion - read that in the voice of Carl Sagan - Chinese are going to do in the future, the question on the minds of the Western European powers entering the 20th century was what all those Americans were going to do.

Anyone know why the US is stilling growing significantly, as opposed to most European countries?

The US has a larger influx of immigrants and a higher birth rate, those are the two dominant factors in that order.

Which demographics are producing most children?

Recent immigrants and the minority ethnic and racial populations, but not African Americans or Jews. The current trend is for Latin Americans and Asians to increase as a percentage of the population with Whites, African Americans and Jews declining.

How much does the number of legal immigrants contribute to the growth?

Between a quarter to a third of total US population growth is due to immigration as opposed to birth.

Why is this article and every other one I'm reading online speculating that the 300 millionth American will be an immigrant? Seems like a statistical improbability when you take the information from the US Pop Clock, (7 seconds for a new birth, 31 for an emigration to the US), it sums up to almost 4.5:1 that the 300 millionth kid was a baby born somewhere in the US.

http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/a rchives/population/005164.html

"Hispanics, who may be of any race, accounted for about one-half of the national population growth of 2.9 million between July 1, 2003, and July 1, 2004. The Hispanic growth rate of 3.6 percent over the 12-month period was more than three times that of the total population (1.0 percent)."

1.6 MW only sounds impressive. It actually isn't. If you see a switchboard that is designed to handle a MW or see the size of a generator that is designed to produce a MW you won't be as impressed. They are small because a MW isn't a huge amount of power. 1.6 MW is only 2145 HP. This is about 5 or 6 Mac trucks operating near full power (like driving up a mountain pass).

There is a reason that people like to make comparisons like 1.6 MW is the equivalent of 1000 homes, because homes don't use much power. Find a silicon refinery or a mine and see how much power they use. 30-50 MW will be a low value. Find a large water pump (like the ones they use in New Orleans). It will probably be in the MW range.

In 2005 the US produced 4 trillion KWh of electricity which comes to a value of 1.5 KW of electrical power being used per capita. The average household size in the US is 2.61. This means the US energy production is about 4 KW per household. If you assume that the average household actually uses 1 KW, then utilities and other uses account for another 3 KW. These values only take into account electricity usage.

Now if we compensate Google's power usage by the average amount of power produced per household (instead of what is used per household--because this is what most people think of when they hear this comparison), we get a measly 400 households (as in that Google could handle the entire electrical production of a city of 1050 people). Hardly impressive.

Okay, but you'd need new TV tuners that tune to the "old" bands, but in some digital format. What do you suppose the chances are of new sets supporting that anytime soon?

I was curious about the accuracy of this statement --here are the data. My summary:

• The US marriage rate is about double that of Western European countries, which is probably the main reason the divorce rate is also roughly double. (See, the "Marriage causes divorce!" guy was correct!)
• If you rank by divorce rate/marriage rate, most Protestant countries are in the 45-55% range, with the US lower than Germany or the UK.
• Catholic countries have much lower divorce rates, which is probably the main reason why nominally Catholic France is down at 46%.

to feed an exponentially growing number of people.

What you say is a common and a fallacious argument. In fact, there are plenty of other statistical indicators for measuring poverty, and income compared to the median is not even amongst the most important of them.
Here is another measurement, far more important one: can you get reasonable medical assistance in case you are ill? In the US, one in ten people NEVER sees a doctor, because the costs are too high.

SEE:

http://www.cmwf.org/publications/publications_show .htm?doc_id=280812

http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p60-223.pdf

>funerals you will be attending if we DON'T do the surveillance

And here's what those funerals will be about:
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/06s0 108.xls

It's crucial to notice that doing surveillance is *not* the issue. The question is whether the executive can bug people without cause and without any judge knowing about it. There has been no controversy about legitimate, national-security-related spying. If you have heard otherwise, it is because someone told you a cold-blooded lie in order to manipulate you. Remember John 8:32 and fight back.

One big reason may be that the Diebold problems haven't been very prominent in the type of media that the average American consumes. This problem with the Dutch computers was featured on national tv, during prime time, on what would be considered "basic cable". Maybe if "60 minutes" covered it there would be a difference, although since only 15 million people watch 60 minutes, and there are 300 million people in the USA, I doubt it.

Also, since the Netherlands is very densely populated, if someone missed this news and isn't (yet) outraged by it, chances are good that they will come across someone who will tell them all about it. Outrage travels like a virus, and (un)fortunately the USA's sparse population acts as an inhibitor. In the Netherlands 5% will grow to 100% much faster than in the states.

According to Foreign Trade Statistics USA imports much more than it exports, at least since 1971.

Really? Then why was the balance of payments deficit for goods for 2005 a record $782 billion? The last time the United States had a positive balance of payments was in 1973, and the deficit has been on an almost steady increase for the past two decades. Read the figures published by the Census Bureau (warning PDF link), or if you prefer, a a graph from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. With these figures, the only reason why the United States hasn't yet suffered an Argentina-style economic collapse is that other countries keep buying up US debt...

I guess we in the U.S. just can't win. If we import a lot of something, we're selfish. If we export a lot of something, we're putting the rest of the world out of business. Have you seen the size of the U.S. trade deficit? I'd say it's more like we're keeping the rest of the world in business!

I found this US Census page, but I can't find the "live" moving clock. It seems, to me at least, that a 1% yearly growth in population isn't really anything to be alarmed about. In fact, if you look at population density, our population density is less than average: 31 people per km compared to the world average of 48 km. That's less than 10% of the density in Japan or India. Some European countries are way up there as well. Germany and the UK both have more than 200 people per km. Even without Alaska, we're still only at about 37 people per km.

If we had Germany's population density, the US would have 2.2 billion people (and still only about 400 interested in the World Cup).

The question isn't about density, as it is about resources and the ecological footprint that Americans have. We're terribly, awfully wasteful. If we all became more conscious about resource use, in twenty years, even with 360 million people, we could use less resources then than we use today. At that point, the economic benefits of population (and immigration) outweigh the other costs.

I'd be a lot more worried if we've maxed out our resource use efficiency and there was simply no way to improve. No, we've got a lot of improvements we can do. If we follow through with them, US population growth won't be a problem in the next century.

Which is why the middle class is shrinking. But don't believe me. Read this. http://www.factcheck.org/article249.html

Well, I didn't believe you, and checked myself. That article talks about the middle class change in 2003. What about in 2004 and 2005? Turns out that in 2004 and 2005 the middle class gained by +0.4% and +0.2%, respectively, while the lower-income group changed by 0.0% and -0.5%, respectively, using the same measures of middle and lower class as used in the referenced article.

These were certainly surprising results to me. I'm no Bush apologist, which is why I found these results surprising.

--Rob

Which is why the middle class is shrinking. But don't believe me. Read this. http://www.factcheck.org/article249.html

Well, I didn't believe you, and checked myself. That article talks about the middle class change in 2003. What about in 2004 and 2005? Turns out that in 2004 and 2005 the middle class gained by +0.4% and +0.2%, respectively, while the lower-income group changed by 0.0% and -0.5%, respectively, using the same measures of middle and lower class as used in the referenced article.

These were certainly surprising results to me. I'm no Bush apologist, which is why I found these results surprising.

--Rob

Total midyear population, 1950-2050.

In the 1960s, global population growth was around 2%. Doubling every thirty years or so; very bad. However, the growth rate peaked at 2.19% in 1963, and has never been higher. It's been steadily decreasing, and it's now around 1.17%. (Doubling every sixty years.) The number of children actually born in a given year peaked in 1989, and has been decreasing since then.

This isn't to say that overpopulation is taking care of itself; these things happen because people fight to make birth control available and so forth. The trend can be encouraged or discouraged by public policy decisions. And, of course, there's no guarantee that ten billion people (the likely asymptote) will be living comfortably here.